Grenfell: Rydon manager complained of ‘cheap, incompetent’ subcontractors

The Grenfell Tower refurbishment was a “poorly performing site” in 2015, which main contractor Rydon’s contracts manager blamed on “cheap, incompetent subcontractors”, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has heard.

Simon Lawrence, the former Rydon contracts manager who was in charge of the site, made the admission in an internal email to a colleague in which he complained that “I haven’t actually seen a budget for Grenfell in the last eight months at least.”

When asked by leading counsel to the Inquiry Richard Millett
QC who the “cheap and incompetent” subcontractors were, Lawrence said “I think
that’s just me having a general vent”. He said he could not recall who they
were.

Millett replied: “You must have felt pretty worked up about it to be able to say things, even internally, this candid. I’m just wondering why you can’t recall.”

He then went on to ask why Lawrence felt the site was performing poorly.

Lawrence said it was down to “poor surveying”. He added: “And
I’m guessing at this because I don’t recall – it’s probably to do with orders
and getting subcontractors on site in a timely manner.”

Asked what he would have done to make sure that
subcontractors would have acted competently, Lawrence said he had conversations
with his colleagues.

Budget

Millett asked Lawrence to confirm if his complaint about the
budget meant that the contracts manager hadn’t seen one from around the time Rydon
signed a contract in October 2014 with the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant
Management Organisation (TMO) until June 2015, to which Lawrence replied that
it did.

Millett asked if not seeing a budget for eight months rang
alarm bells with Lawrence. “You were the contract manager on this project. How
can you account for not seeing any budget at all for a period of eight months?”

“I can’t,” Lawrence replied.

Millett suggested that this was a “pretty big lapse” and meant that Lawrence would have had no control over cost overruns.

But Lawrence replied that there was still a team within Rydon dealing with it: “It’s not as if receipts are just being put in a drawer and forgotten about. It’s being managed by a managing surveyor of equal level and his team, but it would be preferable to see the budget, yes.”

Millett replied: “I’m going to suggest to you that it would
be essential for any contact manager to keep absolute tabs on the budget on a
regular basis throughout the life of a project, surely?”

Lawrence said: “I don’t think it would be absolutely essential
quite as you are suggesting because we have other parts of the department that
deal specifically with that element.”

Workload and resources

With Lawrence due to leave the project in October 2015,
another email between Neil Reed of landlord’s agent Artelia UK and Claire
Williams of the TMO, expressed concern about the workload the Rydon contracts
manager faced.

Reed noted in the August 2015 email: “Simon Lawrence leaving in 12 weeks…with no indication of contingency planning.”

Under a section headed “resource levels”, it added: “I think Simon needs help with what appears to be an overwhelming volume of work to manage in the coming weeks.”

Millett asked Lawrence: “Do you accept that, by August 2015,
Rydon was not committing sufficient resource to the Grenfell Tower project?”

Lawrence replied: “I don’t know in what context and what
resource we are talking about because I don’t think the site team or the team
as a whole had particularly changed.”

But he conceded: “There’s always a considerable amount of work to do, yes… And I was involved more from a hands-on point of view than probably you would expect of a contracts manager.”

Asked why he didn’t go to the client for an “extra pair of hands”, Lawrence said he wouldn’t go to them but internally to Rydon. Asked why he didn’t do that, Lawrence said: “Because I felt that I was obviously doing my best to cope with it… We’re always under time pressure and volume of work.”

‘Nonchalance’

Millett also brought up an email sent by Reed in May 2016,
after Lawrence had left the project, in which he accused Rydon of “nonchalance”.

The email read: “This is just to flag this is becoming a
farce: despite all our efforts to ensure a smooth landing, I have to say I do
not think I have ever worked with a contractor operating with this level of
nonchalance. We are all getting sucked into doing far more than we ought to at
this stage of the project.”

Reed went on to complain about “additional site visits,
additional meetings, endless emails on design-related issues that don’t concern
us”.

Millett asked if this was a fair criticism of Rydon up to
the point at which he left on 23 October 2015. Lawrence replied: “No, I don’t
think so.” He also confirmed that neither Artelia nor the TMO had accused him
or Rydon generally of “nonchalance”.

The Inquiry continues.